Virtual Seminar Sessions Round-Up

Over the last few weeks JSCM’s European team has broadcast a series of short impulse sessions on specific methodological topics.
Thanks to everyone who moderated and attended these sessions, we had a great number of people attending and it was wonderful to see everyone even if it was just on screen!

The broad goal of these sessions was twofold: a) to encourage participants to think about new methodological approaches and research questions, and, b) to provide them with a forum to discuss their experiences or concerns related to these methodological topics with experts.

Our first session took place on February 18: Analyzing and Theorizing Supply Networks with Tingting Yan and Jury Gualandris moderating.
“This roundtable focused on what is NOT obvious when analyzing and theorizing supply networks. We spent time exploring the unique and under-addressed features of supply networks. Participants were encouraged to share experiences about theoretical and methodological opportunities and challenges related to the study of supply networks. We had two 25-minute sessions and a few de-brief opportunities. By the end of the session the participants (and ourselves) had a better understanding of the distinctive features of supply networks, prominent gaps existing in the literature and methodological challenges deserving our attention.”"
Jury and Tingtings slides are below:

Our Session on February 25th was entitled “Case study methods in practice” and was moderated by Miriam Wilhelm and Zhaohui Wu
Zhaohui Wu and Miriam Wilhelm reflected on current practices of doing (and publishing) case study-based research in Operations and Supply Chain Management. Some of the key issues that were discussed include sampling strategies, reporting methodology, and persuasion with case studies.

Our March 4th session was entitled : Configurational Approaches and was moderated by Craig Carter and Lutz Kaufmann

SCM faces many “grand challenges”, like climate change, disruptions, networks, and digitalization, where causality is complex. Studying causally complex phenomena using configurations – meaningfully distinct groups of observations within a sample – therefore seems promising. Correlational thinking (and with it using linear approaches leading to generalizable results) is predominant in the field of SCM, and linear thinking certainly continues to be useful. However, limiting theorization and perspectives solely to linear thinking – i.e., not having configurational theorizing and approaches in one’s toolkit – is not a good thing, both for individual scholars and the broader SCM discipline. Established configurational approaches (typologies and taxonomies) have recently been complemented with Qualitative Comparative Analysis (QCA), sometimes called a “neo-configurational” approach, which is drawing on set-theory. This session covered the configurational approach and contrasted it with the correlational one.

Our March 11th session was entitled Context and Manipulations in Experiments and was moderated by Scott DuHadway and Henrik Franke
"This episode of the JSCM Virtual Methods Series discussed two issues: the use of context and the strength of manipulations in experiments. How context can help or hinder experimental research, touch on when and how to avoid providing unwanted context, and discussed interpreting the effect sizes we obtain. We used small group/plenary discussions in order to exchange and develop participants’ ideas for how to improve our experimental designs.

Our final session was on March 18, entitled Research ethics and integrity and moderated by Erik van Raaij and Mark Pagell
“This roundtable put the spotlight on the dark side of publishing. We discussed what questionable or unethical research practices are, used examples to show that they occur in OSCM research, and explain why this issue matters. Then we explored how we can reconfigure the incentive system so that those not engaging in these practices are rewarded; as opposed to what happens today where engaging in questionable or unethical research practices is (1) often rewarded with publication and accolades, (2) not called into question, and (3) not punished”.